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through programs like USAID and the British Desert Locust Control Organization, have killed grasshoppers and locusts, which are complete proteins, in order to preserve the incomplete proteins in millet, wheat, barley, sorghum, and maize. Her field work in Mali focuses on the role of grasshoppers in the diets of children, who, for cultural reasons, do not eat chicken or eggs. Grasshoppers contain essential amino acids and serve as a crucial buffer against kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency that impedes physical and neurological development. In the village where Dunkel works, kwashiorkor is on the rise; in recent years, nearby fields have been planted with cotton, and pesticide use has intensified. Mothers now warn their children not to collect the grasshoppers, which they rightly fear may be contaminated.
    Mainly, the entomophagists bemoaned the prejudice against insects. “In our minds, they’re associated with filth,” Heather Looy, a psychologist who has studied food aversions, said over dinner after the symposium. “They go dirty places, but so do fungi, and we eat
those all the time. And you
don’t want to know about
crabs and shrimp and lobster.” Crabs, shrimp, and
lobster are, like insects, arthropods—but instead of
eating fresh lettuces and
flowers, as many insects do,
they scavenge debris from the ocean floor.
    This injustice—lobster is a delicacy, while vegetarian crustaceans like wood lice are unfit for civilized man—is a centerpiece of the literature of entomophagy.
Why Not Eat Insects
?, an 1885 manifesto by Vincent M. Holt, which is the founding document of the movement, expounds upon the vile habits of the insects of the sea. “The lobster, a creature consumed in incredible quantities at all the highest tables in the land, is such a foul feeder that, for its sure capture, the experienced fisherman will bait his lobster-pot with putrid flesh or fish which is too far gone even to attract a crab,” he writes.
    As it is, contemporary Westerners tend to associate insects with filth, death, and decay, and, because some insects feed on human blood, their consumption is often seen as cannibalism by proxy. Holt takes pains to stress that the insects he recommends for eating—caterpillars, grasshoppers, slugs—are pure of this taint. “My insects are all vegetable feeders, clean, palatable, wholesome, and decidedly more particular in their feeding than ourselves,” he writes. “While I am confident that they will never condescend to eat
us,
I am equally confident that, on finding out how good they are, we shall some day right gladly cook and eat
them
.”

    Holt’s compelling, albeit Swiftian, argument addresses the food problems of his day—“What a pleasant change from the labourer’s unvarying meal of bread, lard, and bacon, or bread and lard without bacon, would be a good dish of fried cockchafers or grasshoppers”—but he is innocent of the nuances of food marketing. Among the sample menus he supplies are offerings like “Boiled Neck of Mutton with Wire-worm Sauce and Moths on Toast.” At dinner in San Diego, it occurred to me that this naïveté had carried down. I was sitting next to Lou Sorkin, a forensic entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History who is also an expert on bedbugs, probably the most loathed insect in the United States today. He had arrived at his latest culinary discovery, he said, while experimenting with mediums for preserving maggots collected from murder victims. Realizing that citrus juice might denature proteins as effectively as a chemical solution, and might be more readily available in the field, he soaked large sarcophagid maggots in baths of grapefruit, lemon, lime, and pomelo juice, and
voilà
! Maggot ceviche. “It’s a little chewy,” he said. “But tasty.”
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